Applications & Apps Business

Research In Motion makes another acquisition as it battles iPhone and Android for the high end smartphone market.

Cellmania, founded in 1999, does a bunch of mobile infrastructure stuff, such as App Store infrastructure, letting mobile operators control the home screens of their customers' phones, and a content distribution network.

The tool enables DIY developers to drag code for different functions and rop them into a template. Consumers with no knowledge of Java (Android’s app programming language) could become first-time app creators.

Fortune's Seth Weintraub calculates if only 1% of Android phone buyers create an application, Android’s application store would grow by 1600 apps every day. That’s well over half a million additional apps created every year; more than five times the total number of apps available at present in Android Market.

Omar Khan, Samsung's chief strategy officer, told LightReading the core mobile applications that users turn to most often tend to the same old web applications – ESPN, Weather Channel, for instance. Khan inists no one buys a smartphone from Samsung just to get ESPN.

But the Strategy Officer thinks buyers might go to Samsung if the Android-based Galaxy S gets a reputation, say, for intense gaming graphics taking advantage of the Super AMOLED display.

What's in it for Samsung is, obviously, a proprietary app. "While the breadth of the applications out there is tremendous, the usage that's occurring is limited to a very small set of applications," says Khan.

What kinds of special applications does Samsung have in mind? One example would be Media Hub to put videos onto the Galaxy S, and advanced, super-cool games to take advantage of the AMOLED screen.

Belkin announces an addition to the Mixit DuraTek durable cable line-- a USB-C cable featuring Kevlar-reinforced conductors and double-braided nylon shielding on the outside.
The USB-C cable is certified by both...

Snap-- aka the rebranded Snapchat-- announces the Spectacles, its video-recording sunglasses, are now available in Europe, 7 months after an initial US launch.
For the unfamiliar, the Spectacles are a pair...